Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix (; 2 December 1891 – 25 July 1969) was a German painter and printmaker, noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of German society during the Weimar Republic and the brutality of war. Along with George Grosz and Max Beckmann, he is widely considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit.

Biography

Early life and education

Otto Dix was born in Untermhaus, Germany, now a part of the city of Gera, Thuringia. The eldest son of Franz Dix, an iron foundry worker, and Louise, a seamstress who had written poetry in her youth, he was exposed to art from an early age. The hours he spent in the studio of his cousin, Fritz Amann, who was a painter, were decisive in forming young Otto's ambition to be an artist; he received additional encouragement from his primary school teacher.

The majority of Dix's early works concentrated on landscapes and portraits which were done in a stylized realism that later shifted to expressionism.

World War I service

thumb|left|Stormtroopers Advancing Under Gas, etching and [[aquatint by Otto Dix, 1924]]

thumb|[[The Trench (Dix)|The Trench, 1920–23, lost]]

When the First World War erupted, Dix volunteered for the German Army. He was assigned to a field artillery regiment in Dresden.

Dix was profoundly affected by the sights of the war, and later described a recurring nightmare in which he crawled through destroyed houses. He represented his traumatic experiences in many subsequent works, including a portfolio of fifty etchings called Der Krieg, published in 1924. Subsequently, he referred to the war again in The War Triptych, painted from 1929 to 1932.

Post-war artwork

thumb|[[The Match Seller, 1920, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart]]

thumb|left|[[Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden, 1926, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris]]

At the end of 1918 Dix returned to Gera, but the next year he moved to Dresden, where he studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste. He became a founder of the Dresden Secession group in 1919, during a period when his work was passing through an expressionist phase. In 1920, he met George Grosz and, influenced by Dada, began incorporating collage elements into his works, some of which he exhibited in the first Dada Fair in Berlin. His early use of collage, in the context of the Weimar Republic, is evident in The Match Seller from 1920. Dix also participated in the German Expressionists exhibition in Darmstadt that year.

He met metalsmith Martha Koch in 1921, and they married in 1923. They had three children together. She was a frequent subject of his portraits.

In 1924, he joined the Berlin Secession; by this time he was developing an increasingly realistic style of painting that used thin glazes of oil paint over a tempera underpainting, in the manner of the old masters. His 1923 painting The Trench, which depicted dismembered and decomposed bodies of soldiers after a battle, caused such a furor that the Wallraf-Richartz Museum hid the painting behind a curtain. In 1925 the then-mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, canceled the purchase of the painting and forced the director of the museum to resign.

Dix was a contributor to the Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition in Mannheim in 1925, which featured works by George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, Karl Hubbuch, Rudolf Schlichter, Georg Scholz and many others. Dix's work, like that of Grosz—his friend and fellow veteran—was extremely critical of contemporary German society and often dwelled on the act of Lustmord, or sexualized murder. He drew attention to the bleaker side of life, unsparingly depicting prostitution, violence, old age, and death.

In one of his few statements, published in 1927, Dix declared, "The object is primary and the form is shaped by the object."

Among his most famous paintings are Sailor and Girl (1925), used as the cover of Philip Roth's 1995 novel Sabbath's Theater, the triptych Metropolis (1928), a scornful portrayal of decadence and depravity in Germany's Weimar Republic, where nonstop revelry was a way to deal with the wartime defeat and financial catastrophe, and the startling Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926). His depictions of legless and disfigured veterans—a common sight on Berlin's streets in the 1920s—unveil the ugly side of war and illustrate their forgotten status within contemporary German society, a concept also developed in Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.

Although frequently recognized as a painter, Dix drew self-portraits and portraits of others using the medium of silverpoint on prepared paper. "Old Woman," drawn in 1932, was exhibited with old-master drawings.

<gallery mode="packed" heights="200">

Otto Dix - The Skat Players (Die Skatspieler) 1920.jpg|The Skat Players, 1920, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Otto Dix - To Beauty (1922).jpg|To Beauty (self-portrait), 1922, Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal

Otto Dix - Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber (1925).jpg|Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber, 1925, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart

Otto Dix - The Art Dealer Alfred Flechtheim (1926).jpg|The Art Dealer Alfred Flechtheim, 1926, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Otto Dix - Hugo Erfurth with Dog (1926).jpg|Hugo Erfurth with Dog, 1926, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid

Otto Dix - Metropolis (1927-28).jpg|Metropolis, 1927–28, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart

</gallery>

The Nazis and World War II

The Nazi-affiliated had defined Dix as one of Germany's most 'degenerate' artists long before the Nazis' takeover of power in January 1933. For example, when Metropolis was exhibited in Dresden for the first time in 1928, one of the German Art Society's founding members and most prominent writer Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder pilloried both Dix personally and the depiction of German society that Metropolis offered, in the Society's art bulletin, the Deutsche Kunstkorrespondenz [German Art Correspondence]. In April 1933, Richard Müller, who with Feistel-Rohmeder had founded the Deutsche Kunstgesellschaft Dresden, sacked Dix from his post as a professor of painting at the Dresden Academy, on a directive from Saxony's Reichskommissar Manfred von Killinger. The reason given was that, through his art, he had committed a 'violation of the moral sensibilities' of the nation. Dix later moved to Lake Constance in the southwest of Germany. Dix's paintings The Trench and War Cripples were exhibited in the state-sponsored Munich 1937 exhibition of degenerate art, Entartete Kunst. The Trench was long thought to have been destroyed, but there are indications the work survived until at least 1940. Its later whereabouts are unknown; it may have been looted during the confusion at the end of the war. It has been called 'perhaps the most famous picture in post-war Europe ... a masterpiece of unspeakable horror.

Dix, like all other practising artists, was forced to join the Nazi government's Reich Chamber of Fine Arts (Reichskammer der bildenden Kuenste), a subdivision of Goebbels' Cultural Ministry (Reichskulturkammer). Membership was mandatory for all artists in the Reich. Dix had to promise to paint only inoffensive landscapes. He still painted an occasional allegorical painting that criticized Nazi ideals. His paintings that were considered "degenerate" were discovered in 2012 among the 1500+ paintings hidden away by the son of Hitler's looted-art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt.

In 1939 he was arrested on the trumped-up charge of being involved in a plot against Hitler (see Georg Elser), but was later released.

During World War II, Dix was conscripted into the Volkssturm. Discovered in the possession of the son of Hitler's art dealer, Hildebrand Gurlitt, they were suspected of having been looted by Nazis.

Otto Dix House Museums

thumb|left|200px|Otto Dix House in [[Gera – Dix's birthplace]]

The Otto-Dix-Haus was opened in 1991, at the 100th anniversary of Dix's birth, in the 18th-century house where he was born and grew up, at Mohrenplatz 4 in the city of Gera, as a museum and art gallery. It is managed by the city administration.

As well as providing access to the rooms Dix lived in, it houses a permanent collection of 400 of his works on paper and paintings. Visitors can see examples of his childhood sketch books, watercolours and drawings from the 1920s and 1930s, and lithographs. The collection also includes 48 postcards he sent from the front during World War I. The gallery also regularly hosts temporary exhibitions.

The building was affected by a flood in June 2013. In order to repair the underlying damage, the museum was closed in January 2016, and re-opened in December 2016 following restoration.

The Museum Haus Dix was inaugurated in 2013 in the house where the artist lived with his family and where he worked from 1936 to 1969, in Hemmenhofen, south Germany.

Art market

The painting Portrait of the Lawyer Dr. Fritz Glaser (1921) was sold for £3.6 million at a 1999 Sotheby's London auction.

See also

  • Gurlitt Collection
  • List of German painters

Notes

References

  • Conzelmann, O., Otto Dix (Hannover: Fackelträger-Verlag, 1959).
  • Hartley, Keith et al. (1992). Otto Dix, 1891–1969, London: Tate Gallery. .
  • Hinz, Berthold (1979). Art in the Third Reich, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag. .
  • Karcher, Eva (1988). Otto Dix 1891–1969: His Life and Works. Cologne: Benedikt Taschen. <!--ISBN 3-8228-0272-1 is printed on book but is not valid-->
  • Michalski, Sergiusz (1994). New Objectivity. Cologne: Benedikt Taschen. .
  • Murray, Ann (2023). Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture, 1914–1936. London: Bloomsbury. .
  • Schmied, Wieland (1978). Neue Sachlichkeit and German Realism of the Twenties. London: Arts Council of Great Britain. .
  • Otto Dix online catalog
  • Otto Dix at Museum Syndicate
  • Ten Dreams Galleries
  • Small gallery of works at mess.net
  • DIX Otto-Dix.de
  • Otto Dix